The U.S. Institute of Peace: Bad for the Budget, Bad for the Jews

Something unexpected happened to the 300 full- and part-time staff members of the United States Institute of Peace last spring. Just before they moved into new headquarters — a $186 million architectural oddity in which federal office building meets Disney World — the House of Representatives voted to defund them.

Forty-one Democrats joined the Republican majority in opposing USIP. A subsequent House-Senate budget compromise sustained the institute but sliced $7 million from its allocation, leaving a $54 million target for next time.

And that was without scrutiny of the institute’s work on Iran, Israel and genocide.

Iranian leaders repeatedly call for the destruction of Israel, pursue nuclear weapons and long-range missiles contrary to U.N. sanctions and, from aiding Iraqi and Afghan insurgents to funding Hamas and Hezbollah, support violent international proxies. Decades of Western attempts at diplomatic outreach have failed.

Yet in November 2010, a 40-member panel from USIP and the Stimson Center — a Washington think tank dedicated to non-proliferation — produced Engagement, Coercion, and Iran’s Nuclear Challenge. It called on the Obama administration to implement “strategic engagement” to “rebalance” what the authors labeled America’s punitive dialogue-sanctions approach to the Islamic Republic. The study wanted no more public assertions that last-resort military strikes remain “on the table.”

Instead, it envisioned America connecting to “pragmatists” within the Iranian leadership. These links would aim at compromising Tehran’s nuclear arms drive in exchange for supporting legitimate goals, including peaceful nuclear development. Yet the United States concedes the latter and it was “pragmatists” including former President Hashemi Rafsanjani who early supported Iran’s covert nuclear weapons effort.

In 2009, USIP, in conjunction with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Academy of Diplomacy, issued a 174-page report, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers. The study, conducted by a foreign policy Who’s-Who, recalled the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and invoked the post-Holocaust assertion “never again!” It referred to mass murders in Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere. But it did not mention Iranian threats against the Jewish state.

“Preventing Genocide was not meant to be comprehensive,” said USIP Executive Vice President Tara Sonenshine. Rather, it was intended to guide the Obama administration “regarding organization of the National Security Council and intelligence agencies … [about] how to recognize the danger of genocide” before it is committed.

USIP’s January 2009 Special Report, “Islamic Peacemaking Since 9/11,” surveyed generalized anti-terrorism, pro-tolerance statements from Islamic leaders and Muslim organizations. It included, uncritically, soothing remarks from CAIR — the Council on American Islamic Relations — a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood derivative, at least five of whose former lay leaders or staff have been jailed or deported — and Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He’s the influential Egyptian theologian, affiliated with the Brotherhood, who has called for “conquering” Europe and America by proselytizing and for a second Holocaust of the Jews, this time by Muslims.

USIP has hosted presentations by Palestinian Authority cabinet members and leading Israeli politicians, including, last April, Israeli President Shimon Peres. It makes grants to Israeli and Palestinian Arab groups discussing, if not building, peace. Institute Arab-Israeli publications have included:

“Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility,” by Paul Scham and Osama Abu-Irshaid, a June 2009 USIP Special Report. This paper claims that “experience with intractable conflicts in Northern Ireland, Aceh, and elsewhere suggests that ideologically rigid movements can change over time and that a peace process itself can play a critical role in shaping such an evolution …. While no one should be expected to trust blindly, repeated failures to achieve a lasting solution to this seemingly intractable conflict suggest that a reexamination of our assumptions and analytical frameworks is essential.”

But Hamas leaders insist repeatedly that their movement’s raison d’etre is the destruction of Israel. The analogy between the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland and Arab/Muslim-Israeli/Jewish conflict in the Middle East fails: The Irish Republican Army never called for the destruction of England or its incorporation into Catholic Ireland, mainstream Irish Catholic clergy did not celebrate anti-Protestant bloodshed, and by the time negotiations took hold the IRA had lost outside support.

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace; American Leadership in the Middle East, a 190-page paperback by Amb. Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky, published in 2008 as another guide for the incoming Obama administration. Claiming to come to grips with “lessons learned and opportunities lost,” it fails to account for one of the most obvious lessons: Repeated rejections by Arab leadership, including Palestinian, of peace proposals from the 1930s to 2008. In 2010, the Obama administration named Lasensky a senior advisor to the U.S. mission to the United Nations on Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese affairs.

An old notion brought to life after the Vietnam war, the institute spent 26 years in rented quarters before hosting President George W. Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a 2008 ground-breaking for its new building. Congress had approved $120 million toward architect Moshe Safdie’s “dove-wings-over-boxes” design, with private funds paying the balance.

Across 23rd Street N.W. from the State Department, USIP raises a question. Given State and Defense’s policy planning sections, the U.S. Army’s Peace-Keeping and Stability Operations Institute, and private non-profits like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, why the institute?

Eric Rozenman has published in the Journal of International Security Affairs, the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Policy Review, Middle East Quarterly and newspapers including The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today. He is Washington director of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Any opinions expressed above are solely his own.

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Yes, the USIP is totally useless to the US people and western world, they are nothing but a bunch of useful fools to the Totalitarian aggressors.